FULL 'NBC NIGHTLY NEWS' TO RUN ONLINE

Move Marks Another Milestone in TV's Migration to the Web

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- NBC Nightly News will be the first network evening-news show to run in its entirety online. The full 30-minute newscast will now be available at MSNBC.com.

The entire 'NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams' will now be available online.

Full program
While NBC and rival broadcast networks ABC and CBS have all made individual segments available from their evening broadcasts online, no network has put the full 30-minute program online as one continuous stream.

The move -- the latest milestone in a continuing migration of TV content to the Web -- is a belated nod to the fact that many viewers are simply unavailable to watch evening-news broadcasts in the current 6:30 p.m. time slot and have turned to the Web for news during the day, effectively creating a new prime time for news. CBS News does make all of its segments available at CBSNews.com, but the nightly newscast cannot be watched as a whole.

Different ads
While NBC’s show will essentially be the same, the ad lineup may look significantly different. MSNBC.com will add its own broadband commercial inventory rather than carrying the existing advertisers over from the broadcast. MSNBC.com, however, has yet to attach a sponsor to its online newscast, which begins Nov. 7 at 10 p.m. EST.

The broadband announcement was made today by acting NBC News President Steve Capus and Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com. Titled “The NBC Nightly News Netcast With Brian Williams,” the program will include breaking updates between its TV broadcast and its online airing. The program can be found at nightlynews.msnbc.com.

No. 1 news broadcastNBC Nightly News is the No. 1 evening-news broadcast of the Big Three. ABC World News Tonight ranks second, while CBS Evening News ranks third. On the Web, MSNBC attracted the most unique visitors out of all the news sites measured by Nielsen/Net Ratings for September, with 26.3 million. CNN has the second-largest unique visitor audience, with 26 million, followed by Yahoo News with 25.6 million.

The decision to place the broadcast online comes just days after NBC Universal committed to airing a number of news and entertainment programs in a time-shifted fashion as part of a Time Warner Cable service called Start Over, which allows viewers to watch shows from the beginning that have started within their broadcast time slot. Start Over allows viewers to pause programming, but not to fast forward through the ads.